"From Sinai to Zion" - Hebrews 12:18-29

As always, if you have a Bible, Hebrews 12. If you don't, there should be one

on the table or near and around you.

Feel free to snag that one. If you don't have a Bible and you want one,

take that one. That's totally fine.

We put GPS trackers in them so we can find your house. But other than that.

Those things that you chuckle at, but you're like, I mean, that could be a real thing that people do.

It's a nervous chuckle. I remember when we were growing up, we would always

go to the zoo once a year. You know, they'd give you the behind the scenes tour.

And when we went to Caldwell, we would always go to the behind the scenes petting zoo area.

Anyone who grew up in White House, probably other places knows what this is like.

And you would go in there and hang out where they had the goats and the sheep.

They would always take you to see the big snake, you know, which was gross to see the here nor there.

But as a young boy, you had to touch it. You know, like I'm terrified, but you had to do it.

But I always wonder what would be interesting is like, well,

what if we went to the lion's cage, you know, or where they kept the rhinos.

You know, as we're walking around the peddings, everyone's laughing and the

goats are headbutting kids and we think it's hilarious and all that's fine.

But the second you were to drop a apex predator into the mix,

everything would change.

Now, where you are wouldn't change and the place that you're at wouldn't change

and you wouldn't change. What would change is that something has been introduced

into your life that you know, if it wants to, could cause you a lot of harm.

It could do to you whatever it wants.

And I think these are the two areas that a lot of people come to God with.

I think a lot of people grew up on one side of the fence where to go to God, to go to where he was,

was met with a lot of finger pointing and a lot of, you have to do this and

you have to do that and you can't do this and you can't do that.

And it was a very rules-based situation.

And in response to that, there's been some overcorrection.

And I think a lot of people find themselves in the other ditch,

which is God just doesn't care.

He's like one of those sheep at the petting zoo. He just wants you to come and

pet him and give him a carry out of your hand and just do whatever you want.

And if you grab his horn or if he's a goat and you pull on him a little bit,

it's fine. It's no big deal.

I think these are both ditches we can fall into when we ask the question,

who can ascend the hill of the Lord? Who can go to see who God is?

The Hebrews here, the writer knows that they have a picture in their mind of

who can go to where God is, who can go see him.

I think most people, when they try to relate to someone, I know me,

like I'm looking for hobbies or interests or things they're into.

This is true in the church world too. Like when I start talking to somebody

who is a pastor or goes to a church and they start figuring out what I do and we start chatting.

One of the questions I love to ask people, in fact, every time I've interviewed

somebody, I always ask them, give me like your top three favorite books,

Christian theology books.

I can pretty much know what I need to know if you can give me your three books.

And if they say certain names, like if I were to ever hear somebody say,

you know, I just love this book by R.C.

Sproul, my antennas are going to go up. I'm going to go, me and this guy might get along.

And if they say, you know, my favorite book is by Joel Osteen,

I'm going to go, me and this guy probably won't get along. We just know where we land.

We know kind of where we sit theologically.

And again, I think some of the issue when we talk about going to God is we approach

him the same way and we kind of go, well, what are you interested in?

What am I interested in? And let's just kind of figure out where we can find

some common ground, Lord.

Do you like football? I like football. Don't you pray for the Cowboys?

I don't know, whatever your thing is.

They need it. Micah Parsons, I know. It's okay.

Do you like this? Do you like that? And we try and find these common denominators

so we can relate to the Lord that way. But again, he hasn't really called us to do that.

So again, the question this morning is who can ascend the hill of Lord? Who can go to the Lord.

And maybe a better question is, how in the world could you do that?

David himself is admitting, man, you got to have a pure heart.

Your spirit has to be in perfect relationship to truth.

Everything has to be going well for you. So again, if you have a Bible,

we're going to be in Hebrews 12. We're going to start in verse 18.

As a quick intro to what's been going on in this chapter, we've gone through

chapter 11, which is the hall of faith.

If you remind yourself, we began in chapter 11 by saying, faith is not something

that you give to the Lord. It's something he gives to you.

Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, faith is a gift given to you by grace to open your eyes to who God is.

But just like any gift, faith must be exercised.

If somebody gives me a gift and I put it on the shelf and don't do anything

with it, I've wasted that gift.

If we've been given the gift of faith, we're to exercise it.

And that's what Hebrews chapter 11 really is, is a picture of all these men

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

and women who exercise the faith that they've been given.

As he gets to chapter 12, he begins by giving us this picture of racing, right?

We're running the race of faith. As we exercise our faith out,

we're striving, we're racing, we're making sure we take off every encumbrance

and every sin that entangles us.

And there's a pattern to chapter 12 where he's going to give us something to

do and then a motivation.

Something to do and then a motivation. You could call this an exhortation and a motivation.

So for instance, beginning in chapter 12, he says, since we're surrounded by

such a great cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely.

That's the exhortation. That's what you're supposed to do. The motivation is

looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

He gets to chapter, or sorry, verse four.

He says, in your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point

of shedding blood. We said, man, what an encouraging thing to tell someone.

Hey, your struggle has been really hard. It could be worse and it's probably

going to get worse, right?

That's what people expect for you to tell them like, hey, I need some good news.

You're like, you're probably going to bleed later.

I does this in verse 12. We talked about this last week. Therefore,

lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees.

Why? What's the motivation? Because to not do that is to not see the Lord.

To not get up and walk is to not see the Lord.

So we get to verse 18 and we're going to have two more of these rhythms.

He's going to give us an exhortation. He's going to give us something to do.

He's going to give us some motivations.

I'm going to go ahead and give you my outline a bit here. First is from Sinai to Zion.

Second is from passing to permanent. We'll save the last one for the crescendo. How about that?

So let me just read Hebrews 12. We'll start with 18 through 21.

He says, for you have not come to what may be touched.

You have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom

and a voice whose words make the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken

to them, for they could not endure the order that was given.

If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.

Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.

So the picture he's painting for them is one that they would have known very

well This is the picture of mount sinai and so they get Brought out of egypt

by god, right? There's the plagues.

We're studying egypt with the students right now I'm excited to get into the

plagues and all that that means But he delivers them out of egypt through his

man moses They complain and they argue that now now we're at this red sea and

now they're just going to come kill us and he parked the Red Sea and they cross over on dry land.

So then they get to Mount Sinai.

And you would think this is where God is going to meet with them.

This is going to be some awesome moment of worship.

And they're going to have an acoustic guitar. Chris Tomlin is going to come

out. They're going to sing, Here I am. It's going to be great.

This is going to be a beautiful moment for them.

And yet here's what we see in Exodus 19.

It says, Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire.

The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln and the whole mountain trembled greatly.

And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God

answered him in thunder.

The Lord came down on Mount Sinai to the top of the mountain.

The Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain and Moses went up.

The Lord said to Moses, go down and warn the people lest they break through

to the Lord to look and many of them perish. What a scene.

What a scene. This is like a worship service. This is what this should look like, right?

They've been again delivered out of slavery to Egypt.

They've seen God act on their behalf, but now that they're seeing this God up

close in person, there's an issue.

It's one thing to be around God and to see him work and to see him do miracles

and to see him work in people's lives.

It's one thing to be in and around what he's doing. We see this in the life

of Jesus where people see Jesus heal people and they see Jesus work miracles

and they see Jesus even raise people from the dead and they're kind of in and around him.

They see God working through him, but it's a very different thing to come face

to face with the God of the Bible, not just to see him work, but to be around him.

And I think, again, this is a lot of people's experience, especially where we

live, is you can go to church and you can see a lot of great people and there's

all kinds of great things going on. And you can say, man, look what God's doing.

He's helping the homeless and he's feeding the poor and he's helping people

in need and he's doing all of these things.

And man, those are great things. And we don't begrudge anyone for being a part of those things.

But what we do say is there's a difference in being a part of what God is doing. and going to God.

For the Israelites, there's a difference in experiencing a miracle that he's

done for you and ascending the hill of the Lord.

And they're experiencing that difference right now.

God has worked for them, but now that they have come face to face with him,

there's an issue and they realize something.

We can't go there. We can't go up this hill.

We can't go to where God is. In fact, God tells us very specifically,

if you come to where I am right now, you will die. You can't be here.

After the Ten Commandments are

given, this is the scene we see in the next chapter, Exodus 20, 18 and 19.

It says, Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning

and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid

and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses,

You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us lest we die.

Here's the question. Is their response wrong? them? Is their response an issue?

Because when we read something like this, our sensibilities would say, yes.

What do you mean you don't go to God? What do you mean you don't go to where

he is? Why wouldn't you go to him?

He loves us and he cares for us. And he's like our grandpa and he wants us to

sit on his lap and hang out with him. Why wouldn't you go to where God is?

And yet their response to him is, Moses, you can go talk to him.

We'll listen to you, but we can't hear him speak or we're going to die.

And again, I don't think they're wrong because what they've realized is this is not a sheep or a goat.

This is a line, right? This is a line. This is the king that we're dealing with.

We're glad when he worked for us, but now that he's dealing with us personally,

now that he's not dealing with the Egyptians, now that he's not handling the

Egyptians, now that he's not swallowing up the Egyptians, now that he's dealing

with our sin, there's a problem.

And the problem is not God. The problem is us.

We're the issue. We can't ascend the hill of the Lord or we'll die.

They're aware of their sinfulness. They're now aware that God can do whatever

he wants, whatever he wants. with whomever he wants, however he wants to do it.

That was their experience. That's what the Hebrews would have had in mind as they read this letter.

So what's the encouragement, right?

The exhortation, what he wants us to do, right?

You have not come to this. He says in verse 22, he gives us the encouragement,

but you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God,

the heavenly Jerusalem,

to the innumerable angels, to the festival gathering, to the assembly of the

firstborn who enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all,

to the spirits of righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,

and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

What's changed for Christians, what's changed for you, if you're a Christian, is not God.

He is not different at Mount Sinai than he is today.

And if you approach him, you approach the exact same God that these Hebrews

said, if we go near him, he'll kill us.

We'll die in his presence. We'll end up just like the Egyptians.

We'll end up just like every other nation who's gone up against him.

We know that we're sinners.

We know that our heart's not pure. We know that we don't only think on truthful things.

We know that this is true. And we make the mistake of going,

well, the God of the Old Testament was mean, and the God of the New Testament is different.

He got a little older, he got a little nicer, and so now he invites us in,

and that is not what's happening.

Hebrews says, it's not that God has changed. It's the mountain that you sit at that has changed.

That you come to Mount Zion, not to Sinai. In other words, you come to a mountain of grace, not of law.

Sinai is the place where the law was given. And this is why so much fear comes

on the people, because as they hear the Ten Commandments, they know,

I have broken almost every one of those.

And then they turn around and say lord. We'll do exactly what you said We'll

do exactly what the law says and they find out real quick.

No, they won't And if you're honest with yourself, you know that you won't either,

You know that you've broken god's law You know that you haven't done what he's

asked you to do You know that your heart's not pure and that your spirit isn't

only focused on true things And so the writer of hebrews says to his christian

audience the same that he says to us,

You have not come to sinai.

You have come to zion you have come to

Zion he says the city of the

living God what's changed is that

you have a brother who has ascended ascended

Sinai for you that Jesus Christ your mediator has done what no other human could

do the Jesus Christ the man Christ Jesus has ascended Zion's hill he waits for

you at the top but not only that he has ascended Sinai he has completed the

law he has fulfilled the law.

He has done every single thing that God has asked him to do.

He has a pure heart. His spirit is perfectly focused on true things.

He has never turned from the left or to the right.

He always came to do God's will. And in so doing, it's not that God changed.

It's that Sinai was fulfilled.

Sinai was fulfilled. And because of Christ Jesus, he offers to you the righteousness

that he rightfully earned so that you can come to Zion's Hill.

So that you can come to Zion's Hill and do nothing but lay your feet and hands

down in front of him and say, I have no right to be here.

None of us has any right this morning to ascend the hill of the Lord.

That's the first answer to the question. How do you ascend the hill of the Lord?

By understanding that you have no right to be there.

So when God comes to this mountain, we come to, maybe better said,

his mountain. We come to God through Christ.

And the writer here is begging these Hebrews, don't go back to Sinai. Don't go back to the law.

Don't go back to trusting yourself. Don't go back to your religious to-do list.

Don't go back to your moralistic thinking.

Don't go back to thinking that somehow, someway, you can come to the feet of

Mount Sinai and climb at yourself.

Don't do that. Go to Zion.

Go to the mountain that you are not asked to climb on your own,

but are instead invited to climb so that you can be with God. You can dwell with him.

He finishes this section by saying in verse 24 that we've come to Jesus,

the mediator of a new covenant, to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better

word than the blood of Abel.

There's a lot of different interpretations of that. I would say it this way.

Abel's blood cries out from the ground for justice.

And Christ's blood cries out to you and me that justice has been satisfied.

That every sin, every struggle, every temptation that you and I deal with,

everything that causes us harm will one day be taken away forever as we live

in the heavenly Zion with Christ Jesus. Go to Zion.

Second, from passing to eternal, from temporary to eternal, you can say it that way.

Verse 25 to 27. I remember we used to go to church camp, which those of you

who have been here long enough know that I love.

I love sleeping in dorms and taking showers with 19 other people.

It's great. I don't know why you wouldn't love that.

Every time someone's like, I love camp. It's like, I question you. I question everything.

Do you shower? I don't know. Anyway, I remember we would always play this game

where there was like, they would set up this 20 yard by 20 yard grid and they

would put a bunch of stuff out there like foam noodles and things like that.

And you would be on teams of two and they would blindfold one person and the

other person was supposed to like yell at them, you know, take a left,

take a right, don't go that far.

And they're supposed to walk them through this obstacle course.

And the point of the game is saying, well, you got to figure out which voice to listen to.

You know, everything you do at camp has a breakdown. Like it can't just be a

fun game. It's going to be like, what does this teach us about the Lord?

And you're like, we all need rest.

We all need to sleep. Like, but I got the point of the game.

And of course we found a way to circumvent these rules where we would just line

each other up in a straight line where there was nothing there.

And we just said, dude, just floor it.

Like if you hit something, you hit something. All right, but the quicker the

game's over, the quicker we can go rest. It's all gonna be okay.

But the point was, hey, you gotta figure out which voice to listen to.

Verse 25 says this. Again, this is our exhortation. This is what we're supposed to do.

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking for

if they that's the israelites did not

escape when they refused him who warned them on earth in other words they didn't

keep the law god warned them on earth they refused to listen much less will

we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven from zion right from the heavenly

jerusalem at that time his voice shook the earth but now he is promised,

yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.

This phrase, yet once more, indicates the removal of things that are shaken,

that is, things that have been made in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.

Do not refuse him who is speaking from heaven.

Again, he's just told them, don't go back to Sinai. Don't go back to the law.

And now he's going to tell them, make sure and listen to the one who sits in heaven.

Make sure and listen to the one who sits at the right hand of the father.

Make sure and listen to the one that the Psalm says is going to one day make

the earth as if it didn't exist anymore, right?

That his enemies will be like a footstool to him. That's the one you need to listen to.

Logic is because he speaks of things that cannot be shaken or destroyed.

The word here in the Greek is literally to be toppled. This idea that everything's

going to be knocked over.

In other words, why would you listen to something that one day will not exist

when you could listen to something that is eternal?

Someone who is eternal, someone who is all-consuming, who is eternally gracious and kind to you?

Why would you listen to these temporary voices?

Here he's getting at a number of things, but you could just imagine maybe there's

some Roman acquaintances in their ear.

They've been persecuted for being Christians, and these Romans are in the ear

going, hey, listen, when you were Jewish, we let you be Jewish.

We don't mind you being Jewish.

We don't mind you having the temple. We don't mind you worshiping that God.

We don't mind you doing those things. do you really want to be persecuted?

Do you really want to lose your life? Do you really want to bleed,

as Hebrews tells us, because of this Jewish carpenter who you say rose again?

Is that really what you want?

Maybe it's their Jewish friends and family who are getting in their ears saying,

are you really going to turn your back on us? Man, we've loved you your whole life.

We've raised you. We've kept you. We've taught you the ways of God.

We've taken you to the temple.

You know how this works. You know how religion looks.

Are you really going to listen to this Jesus guy?

Are you going to set aside Abraham and Moses, David? Are you going to really ignore the high priest?

Maybe the hardest voice to ignore is their own, their own selves saying,

you know, I'm a smart person. I could probably figure this out on my own.

Listen, this is still our constant battle. We were bombarded with voices every

single day, begging for an ear.

You are bombarded every day, whether you realize it or not, with,

things that people want you to know, ads that people want you to see,

worldviews that people want you to take in, whether it's a political worldview

or how you're supposed to live or where you're supposed to go, right?

Begging to listen to you. Hey, here's, you want to be happy. Here's what you do.

You want to be blessed. Here's what you do. You want to be comfortable. Here's what you do.

You want to have something that'll bring you fulfillment. Here's what you do.

And there is lie after lie after lie after lie.

The greatest one is just follow your heart, do what you think is right.

If you feel like you're supposed to do that, then you should just do that.

Follow your desires, do whatever feels right. And again, I think none of these

voices are louder than our own.

The hardest voice for me to silence

is not everyone else's, it's my own because I can't get away from it.

I can turn off my TV, I can turn off my phone, I can block people,

I can stop listening to things.

But when it's just me, Just me alone, hanging out with myself.

That is the loudest voice in my life that I have to remind myself, I'm not eternal.

This brain that I have, these thoughts that I have, this logic that I've conjured

up will one day be shaken.

It will one day be toppled.

Now, praise God, I'll be given a new body at the resurrection.

I will live with him forever. But what you see and what I have and all these

things that I've learned that I try and make decisions with, they'll be gone one day.

One day he says he will shake the very foundations of the earth and there will

be one thing that remains, the kingdom of God and its King Jesus Christ.

Paul reminds his church in Colossae with this, chapter 3, 1 through 4,

if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where

Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth for

you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with him in

glory from temporary to eternal.

Let me close here these last two verses.

It says, therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

And thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe,

for our God is a consuming fire.

Our God is a consuming fire from cowards to worshipers, from cowards to worshipers.

That's the picture we get here.

Said, from fear to worship, but I think that's wrong. I think a fear of the

Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

I think a healthy fear of who God is, is a good thing.

Again, we should never forget that the same God that was on Sinai is the same

God that we're trying to approach this morning.

But we should not be cowards because the Bible tells us not to be.

We should not tremble in fear like the Israelites did because the Bible tells

us we don't have to anymore.

Again, when I think of this fear, I don't mean a cowardice or a scaredness.

I mean a healthy fear of what God can do about who he is. A healthy fear that

God is holy and we are not.

Growing up, one of the first things they teach you whenever you start doing

woodworking is you should have a healthy fear of that saw.

You should have a healthy fear of that saw. Of course, when you're 14 or 15,

or like when I was eight, my dad let me use a nail gun because why not, dude? Send it.

Um, yeah, but you should have a healthy fear of this song.

Usually, you know, the guy that's teaching you that you'll go,

well, why? And he'll just hold up a hand like this. Like, I don't know.

I mean, everything's fine.

It's great, but there should be a healthy fear when we come to the Lord and

never forgetting that again, we have no right to be here, that if we were left

to our own devices, we're left to our own sins, that he would swallow us up,

that we would come face to face with him one day, and we would face eternal death.

That if not for his grace and mercy in our life, and not for him taking a dead

man like me and making him alive, and not for him taking an orphan like me and

adopting me into his family, if not for that grace shown to me,

my rightful ending should be eternal death.

As this said, our God is a consuming fire. We should never forget that.

When we ask the question, who can ascend the hill of the Lord?

The answer is Jesus can ascend the hill of the Lord.

Why should we be able to ascend the hill of the Lord? We simply say,

because Jesus said we could.

Because Jesus said we could come. Because Jesus paid for our sins.

Because Jesus has given us righteousness.

Because Jesus has done for us what we could not do ourselves.

You do not have to be a coward in front of the Lord anymore.

You don't have to hide your sins from him.

A room this size, I have no doubt, there is plenty of us in here that have sins

that we wish nobody would know about.

And you're hoping amongst hope that no one will find out about something that

you're doing, something that you've done, something that's going on in your

life, a sin that you don't want anyone to know about, I would just tell you,

that's how you live in cowardice before the Lord.

Instead, go to the Lord with your sins and say, man, this is my sin.

This is what I've done. This is where I've failed. This is where I've messed up.

Because he, again, he has promised that he will forgive you of that sin.

He says this in Psalm 27, The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?

Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?

When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes,

it is they who stumble and fall.

Though an army encamp around me, my heart shall not fear. Though war rise against

me, yet I will be confident. it.

One thing have I asked of the Lord that I will seek after that I may dwell in

the house of the Lord all of the days of my life to gaze upon the beauty of

the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

You could say that this way. One thing I've asked the Lord that I will seek

after that I may dwell at Zion for eternity, that I may dwell where God is forever.

Because if I am where God is, then I don't have to be scared of anything.

Nothing exists on this side of heaven or not that can pluck me from his hand.

You can be confident when you

go to the Lord this morning, if you are in Christ, that he will hear you.

You can be confident this morning, if you're in Christ, that he will listen

to you, that he will invite you to his table, that you will find that he is

gracious and kind to you.

But listen to me, if you are not in Christ, you cannot go to the Lord's table.

This is why missions exist.

This is why we exist as Trinity Bible Church. First and foremost,

to bring glory to our God, but secondarily to remind people and to tell people

and to warn people, listen,

God has said that you cannot come to him outside of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

There is no other mediator. There is no person on earth that can go and do this

for you, that Christ Jesus is the one who died.

This is what we tell our neighbors and our friends. This is what we preach. This is what we teach.

Not that you can come to God on your own terms, but that God has come to you

and he has given you the terms of your surrender.

He has said to come, come.

So again, come to Zion this morning, not Sinai. Listen to what is eternal, not what is temporary.

Don't be a coward, but worship the Lord. Worship the Lord. Let's pray.

Father, as always, thank you for a chance to open your word.

God, maybe just take a moment here to thank you for that.

For your word, first and foremost, but for the opportunity to open it in public

places like this, in an air-conditioned room where we can sit in comfort and

listen to what it is you've given us.

Spirit, I pray that you take these words that I've said and make them effective,

that your word would go forth and do what only it can do, and that is make dead men live,

make orphans adopted children, take out hearts of stone and put in hearts of

flesh, And God, for those of us that know you, that we would be drawn closer

to you, that our picture of you would be clearer,

that our eyes would see you better, that our ears would hear you better,

and that we would strengthen our weak knees and lift up our hands and get to work.

We wouldn't simply be comfortable by making sure we have all the right answers

and being comfortable in singing and praying and preaching,

be comfortable in our books and theology, but God, that we would challenge ourselves

and be reminded that there is a world around us that does not know who Christ is.

That as you tell your servant, Paul, that you have people in this city.

And God, we believe that.

When we preach the gospel, we evangelize because not of our own works and not

of our own strength, but because we believe that you have people that you are going to save.

We thank you for that. You never pray. Amen.